Fast Fashion and Its Impact on Society

 Written by Cindy Heriadi

    All of us must be familiar with the names Zara, H&M, and Uniqlo. Their reasonably priced clothing must draw in a large number of customers, particularly those with modest incomes. These brands provide affordable and stylish items that are in order to satisfy consumer demand for the newest styles. This is precisely what we refer to as fast fashion. Fast fashion are known as styles that are inexpensive yet still follow the current daily trends. 

    We can define fast fashion by, first, its low or affordable prices. This is one of the major effect fast fashion has on society. By selling products available to those with small earnings, they make trending clothes accessible to the major of society. This enables them to keep up with the latest trends in fashion while also consuming and upgrading their own way of dressing. Those with low incomes could gain so much from this since they have the chance to dress up like how everybody else does. 

    Apart from that, it also makes sense that fast fashion has a significant economic influence. Fast fashion contributes economically, making a huge growth. Fast fashion brands could open employment opportunities, opening up job employments in various fields such as sales, advertisement, and others. This could improve the region's finances through producing a huge amount of fashion goods while also improving the fashion industry. Take junior/young designers for example, it gives them the chance to study and improve from a nice start, and for them to grow professionally as time goes by. Once they’re professional, then they could launch their own product, also for the society’s good. 

    Through producing these products, it can give the fashion industry a wider view, by offering a variety of style options on how people dress. The impact this gives to the society is very simple, which is used as a form of self expression. It improves their ability to show who they are through fashion. It can also be a form of creativity, as it lets people think on their own on how they want to style themselves and such. This can boost their creativity and confidence as individuals. 

    Although fast fashion has had the following beneficial effects on society, we can’t ignore the disadvantages that it can also bring about. For example, one of the most striking and obvious disadvantage is overconsumption. Despite the boost in industry from the huge amount of clothes/accessories produced, it can also make people buy things impulsively. New collections of trends may be updated daily in stores, making customers desire to keep buying them in order to stay current with the fashion. In the worst situation, this could push them into "consumerism," an unhealthy habit that pushes one to keep on making purchases. 

    Not only moral issues such as consumerism, but fast fashion could also put our environment at stake. As we all know, the production of fast fashion is on a big scale of a number, so it undeniably contributes to environment disadvantage. For instance, textiles are fiber-based materials used to make certain clothing. The amounts of this could get a little excessive. For example, 17 million tons of textile waste were disposed of in landfills in 2017, which may have contributed to pollution towards our environment.

    In essence, the fashion business has developed so much thanks to the existence of fast fashion, whereas it has improved the fashion industry by expanding huger accessibility to fashion, generating creativity, or by boosting the economy. Nevertheless, we should still be smart enough to be aware of the negative consequences, which include moral issues as humans and the damages it has caused towards our environment.